Item — HN Reader

> As a writer of very-short-form stuff like emails, it's probably the best model available right now.

This is exactly my feeling with Kimi K2, it's unique in this regard, the only one that comes close is Gemini 3 pro, otherwise, no other model has been this good at helping out with communication.

It has such a good understanding with "emotional intelligence" (?), reading signals in messages, understanding intentions, taking human factors into consideration and social norms and trends when helping out with formulating a message.

I don't exactly know what Moonshot did during training but they succeeded with a unique trait on this model. This area deserves more highlight in my opinion.

I saw someone linking to EQ-bench which is about emotional intelligence in LLMs, looking at it, Kimi is #1. So this kind of confirms my feeling.

Link: https://eqbench.com

1 comments

Careful with that benchmark. It's LLMs grading other LLMs.

Well if lmsys showed anything, it's that human judges are measurably worse. Then you have your run of the mill multiple choice tests that grade models on unrealistic single token outputs. What does that leave us with?

> What does that leave us with?

At the start, with no benchmark. Because LLMs can't reason at this time, and because we don't have a reliable way of grading LLM reasoning, and because people are stubborn thinking LLMs are actually reasoning we're at the start. When you ask a LLM "2 + 2 = ", it doesn't add the numbers together, it just looks up one of the stories it memorized and return what happens next. Probably in some such stories 2 + 2 = fish.

Similarly, when you're asking a LLM to grade another LLM, it's just looking up what happens next in it's stories, not even following instructions. "Following" instructions requires thinking, hence it's not even following instructions. But you can say you're commanding the LLM, or programming the LLM, so you have full responsibility for what the LLM produces, and the LLM has no authorship. Put in another way, the LLM cannot make something you yourself can't... at this point, in which it can't reason.

You have an outmoded understanding of how LLMs work (flawed in ways that are "not even wrong"), a poor ontological understanding of what reasoning even is, and too certain that your answers to open questions are the right ones.

My understanding is based on first-hand experimentation trying to make LLMs work on the impossible task of tasteful simulation of an adventure game.

That's kind of nonsense, since if I ask you what's five times six, you don't do the math in your head, you spit out the value of the multiplication table you memorized in primary school. Doing the math on paper is tool use, which models can easily do too if you give them the option, writing adhoc python scripts to run the math you ask them to with exact results. There is definitely a lot of generalization going on beyond just pattern matching, otherwise practically nothing of what everyone does with LLMs daily would ever work. Although it's true that the patterns drive an extremely strong bias.

Arguably if you're grading LLM output, which by your definition cannot be novel, then it doesn't need to be graded with something that can. The gist of this grading approach is just giving them two examples and asking which is better, so it's completely arbitrary, but the grades will be somewhat consistent and running it with different LLM judges and averaging the results should help at least a little. Human judges are completely inconsistent.

> if I ask you what's five times six, you don't do the math in your head, you spit out the value of the multiplication table you memorized in primary school

Memorization is one ability people have, but it's not the only one. In the case of LLMs, it's the only ability it has.

Moreover, let's make this clear: LLMs do not memorize the same way people do, they don't memorize the same concepts people do, and they don't memorize the same content people do. This is why LLMs "have hallucinations", "don't follow instructions", "are censored", and "makes common sense mistakes" (these are words people use to characterize LLMs).

> nothing of what everyone does with LLMs daily would ever work

It "works" in the sense that the LLM's output serves a purpose designated by the people. LLMs "work" for certain tasks and don't "work" for others. "Working" doesn't require reasoning from an LLM, any tool can "work" well for certain tasks when used by the people.

> averaging the results should help at least a little

Averaging the LLM grading just exacerbates the illusion of LLM reasoning. It only confuses people. Would you ask your hammer to grade how well scissors cut paper? You could do that, and the hammer would say it gets the job done but doesn't cut well because it needs to smash the paper instead of cutting it; Your hammer's just talking in a different language. It's the same here. The LLMs output doesn't necessarily measure what the instructions in the prompt say.

> Human judges are completely inconsistent.

Humans can be inconsistent, but how well the LLM adapts to humans is itself a metric of success.

On the other hand, if you ask me what five times six in base eight is, I can spend a second and repy thirtysix. Is there an LLM able to do that yet?

Seems like a foreshock of AGI if the average human is no longer good enough to give feedback directly and the nets instead have to do recursive self improvement themselves.

No we're just really vain and like models that suck up to us more than those that disagree even if the model is correct and the user is wrong. People also prefer confident, well formatted wrong responses to basic correct ones, cause we have great narrow knowledge in our field but know basically nothing outside of it so we can't gauge correctness of arbitrary topics.

OpenAI letting RLHF go wild with direct feedback is the reason for the sycophancy and emoji-bullet point pandemic that's infected most models that use GPTs as a source of synthetic data. It's why "you're absolutely right" is the default response to any disagreement.